NEW ROCHELLE, NY — Given the sensitive nature of the officer-involved shooting of a Black man by a White cop in New Rochelle on June 5, 2020, we have been exceedingly patient and deliberative in accumulating, analyzing and summarizing publicly available records for New Rochelle Police Officer Alec McKenna and New Rochelle Resident Kamal Flowers. In the case of McKenna his NRPD disciplinary records; in the case of Flowers his criminal records.
While it can be fully anticipated that there will be a great divide of opinion in our findings, we are confident that we did our best to fairly represent what we assess are two deeply flawed individuals.
We present those two stories here, simultaneously and side by side, and leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.
Alec McKenna: A Story of Traffic Stops
Kamal Flowers: A Story of Armed Encounters
These two articles are not the story of what happened the night of June 5, 2020. That story must still wait because, despite, numerous Freedom of Information requests since June 5, 2020, we have yet to receive the complete set of video and police radio transmissions from that night or the various NRPD reports:
- The CCTV video from North Avenue near Park Place and Lockwood Avenue.
- Police Radio Transmissions for the minutes before the Traffic Stop on Pierce Street.
- The NRPD Incident Report plus Supplemental Narrative and all related documents.
- The NRPD Use of Force Report.
- The NRPD Firearm Discharge Report
Likewise, we have yet to receive the complete Internal Affairs records for the hundreds of officers we requested (out of close to 600 requests) except for those of Alec McKenna which were released on March 4, 2021.
At the time, the McKenna records were released we decided not to report further on them without knowing more about the Individual Delinquency Records and supporting documents for all officers. Without them, any reporting on the McKenna records would lack context. We recently obtained those police records.
We obtained the final set of criminal records for Kamal Flowers in December, after months of stonewalling by the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office and the City of Mount Vernon.
We withheld reporting further on the full criminal history of Kamal Flowers until we obtained the full set of detailed disciplinary records for Alec McKenna and the Individual Delinquency Records for all New Rochelle police officers. Without all the IDR records and McKenna’s complete file, we believed any reporting on the Flowers records would lack context.
Putting the McKenna records in context meant entering details from over 700 violations contained in “top line” summaries of Internal Affairs records into a database. We manually entered data from paper documents scanned into PDF files, then added in data from pension records and payroll records. We used this data to code and weight each violation then added them up by officer to score each officer based on more than four dozen fields of data across more than 1,200 records — tens of thousands of bits of information.
The result of that effort is described here:
How We Created the Talk of the Sound New Rochelle Police Department Disciplinary Records Database.
Ultimately, the events of June 5, 2020, appear as the almost inevitable, tragic collision of two trains heading towards each other on a single track; a train wreck resulting from the headlong approach of a police officer willing to break the rules to stop vehicles in the hopes of making dramatic felony arrests and a habitual criminal who lived the gangster life right up to the moment he died.
There are no heroes in these two stories.
